Second Sunday of Advent, Cycle B. Today’s readings: Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, by Tom Holland

In his 2019 book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, award-winning historian Tom Holland examines the myriad ways in which Christian concepts and values still permeate and shape contemporary Western culture. Notions like human rights, equality, and even – ironically – science and secularism, all find their roots in a Christian worldview, he claims.

For Holland, one subversive mystery lies at the heart of this reality, namely the Christ event. More specifically, he believes, the brutal execution of the innocent Jesus endowed the marginalised and downtrodden with a quasi-divine dignity, something utterly inconceivable and absurd for ancient Greek and Roman culture.

Holland writes: “Divinity was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself (...). That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.”

Meeting God in Mark, by Rowan Williams

This subversiveness indeed lies at the heart of the Christian message. In the very first line of his account of the life of Jesus, St Mark uses the Greek word euangelion (a happy announcement), normally translated as ‘Gospel’ or ‘Good News’. However, we must note that in Mark’s time, euangelion did not simply refer to just any good news. Rather, it was reserved primarily for momentous proclamations of a royal or political nature. As former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes in Meeting God in Mark, an euangelion “is a message about something that alters the climate in which people live, changing the politics and the possibilities; it transforms the landscape of social life”.

That Mark therefore, the first of the evangelists to put pen to paper, uses this particular word to characterise his account is not just remarkable but revolutionary. He is laying down the gauntlet. He hijacks the word normally used for imperial pronouncements, and with a knowing wink informs us, his readers, that a new king has arrived, ushering in a radically new world order.

Mark also tells us that a forerunner goes ahead of this new king, in the person of John the Baptist, announcing a major project of infrastructural improvements, as befits a new administration. His message echoes the prophecy of Isaiah in today’s first reading: “Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God! Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low; the rugged land shall be made a plain, the rough country, a broad valley.”

I am old enough to remember a time when the notice of impending roadworks would not inspire the abject dread it does nowadays: the fear of months on end of missed deadlines, constant traffic jams, and dust and fumes choking our lives. Rather, infrastructural maintenance would be met with the hopeful anticipation that our pesky potholes would soon be dealt with. And when a royal or papal visit would be announced, we would half-jokingly wish that our street be included in the itinerary, in hopes that the august visit might bestow upon us the gift of a new coat of asphalt.

Yet John the Baptist, with his austere and eccentric lifestyle, reminds us that our conversion cannot only be skin-deep. A merely superficial exercise of pothole filling (to be promptly washed away by the next rainfall) won’t cut it. We need to accept Christ – and the Holy Spirit he brings – into the depths of our being, allowing him to change us radically, from within. That is the only way in which the euangelion can truly be ‘Good News’, a force for joy and a source of goodness in our lives.

bgatt@maltachurchtribunals.org